Poll: Republicans Love AOL, Democrats Prefer Gmail

Nov 14, 2011

Here is a fun little poll that I wouldn’t put too much stock into, but that will likely spur some interesting discussions in both the tech and political blogospheres today. According to a new survey commissioned by Poll Position, 20% of Republicans consider AOL to be the best email provider. Only 5.3% of Democrats think so. Overall, Democrats prefer Gmail over any other service (27%), though Yahoo Mail is a close second (25%).

While this makes for a good headline, though, the reality is that except for a dislike of Yahoo Mail, there is no statistical difference between Republican’s preference of Gmail (18.9%), Yahoo Mail (15.6%) , AOL (20.3%) and “another e-mail provider” (21.5%). The margin of error in this poll is 3%.

What really disqualifies this poll, though, is the fact that it doesn’t even list Microsoft’s Hotmail as an option. No matter what you think about it, Hotmail remains the world’s most popular web-based email service and not including it here just makes the rest of the survey look suspect.

It should still makes for some entertaining discussions around the water cooler, though.

Here are some other interesting data points from the survey: [list]

Democrats prefer Google over Yahoo by a 27%-25% margin

AOL’s e-mail service was rated best among 18-29 year olds, with 32% picking it versus 10% for Google and 18% for Yahoo. Google did best among 20-44 year olds (37%), while Yahoo was best among 45-64 year olds (27%).

30% of women have no opinion about their preferred email service compared to 20% of men [/list]